Portside

It used to be a dirty word. Bernie Sanders helped remove the stigma – but it’s the spectacular failure of capitalism that has really changed people’s minds.

Evoking Franklin Roosevelt and Martin Luther King Jr., the Vermont senator bridged the aspirations of New Deal liberalism with the democratic socialist tradition.

Bad news for consumers and workers: This year has already seen $4 trillion worth of mergers and acquisitions deals.

The victory for Sanders' legions in all probability won’t be putting Bernie in the White House, but creating a surging and enduring left. That, in turn, requires them to give as much thought to forming or joining autonomous post-campaign organizations, and envisioning post-campaign mobilizations, as they now do to advancing Sanders’s candidacy. Indeed, they need to start forming such organizations today, while they are together campaigning for Sanders.

With disproportionate financial support from Orthodox and politically conservative Jews, much of the American Jewish establishment has aligned itself with Netanyahu against not just the Iran deal but also President Obama and American liberalism, too. In the process, it has also aligned itself against a clear majority of American Jews.

There is nothing new about Northern factories moving to the south for lower labor costs, but starting in the 1960s, higher value manufacturing made the shift and had a more profound impact on the economy, reducing the economic divide. Meanwhile, the political divide between North and South has deepened, and the South has attempted to impose on the rest of the nation its opposition to worker and minority rightst-hrough the vehicle of a Southernized Republican Party.

Just as in the 1850s (with the Dred Scott decision and the Fugitive Slave Act), the Southern labor system (with low pay and no unions) is wending its way north.

Unions historically have supported minimum wage and occupational safety laws that benefited all workers, not just their members. But they also have recently begun investing major resources in organizing drives more likely to yield new laws than new members. Some of these campaigns seek to organize workers who, rightly or wrongly, aren't even designated as employees or lack a common employer, such as domestic workers and cab drivers.

Even without repealing Abood, today’s court decision is plenty catastrophic. It will put financial limits on unions’ campaigns to organize two of the fastest-growing categories of American workers—those who care for the elderly and the sick, and those who care for small children

During the past 20 years, immigrants and young people have transformed the demographics of urban America. Now, they're transforming its politics and mapping the future of liberalism. In America, politics follow demographics: Voters of color and millennial voters stand well to the left of their white and older counterparts in their support for government intervention to counter the market's inequities.